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technical writers on board! and other updates
Published on January 24, 2022 by Ralf Müller

here are some updates from the docToolchain project.

First of all, I would like to thank you for your ongoing support!

Open Collective


For the first time, I withdrew some money from the open collective account.
First, I needed a renewal for my IntelliJ licence.
Second, I bought some game maps and game dev ui from humblebundle.com .

What do game maps have to do with documentation?


Well, a while ago, I drew a wardley map for the docs-as-code approach. I noticed that you not only need the right tools, but you also need the right knowledge about the tools - mainly AsciiDoc. I also got often the feedback that "AsciiDoc is too complex, Markdown is much easier".

So I started to think about it and came up with the idea to create AsciiDoc Koans.
Programming Koans is a concept where you learn a new programming language by turning red unit tests to green. Why not adopt this to AsciiDoc?

The following picture shows a first result (currently in german)

The Koans are written in AsciiDoc itself and the system compares the generated HTML, not the input. This way, you can achieve the goal in different ways and the result is still recognized as correct.

Now, what I miss is some gamification. I thought "what if I have some nice graphics which show your progress on your learning path?". Then I found the game dev items on humble bundle. A perfect match :-)

Documentation


Another thing clearly visible on the wardley map is the fact that docToolchain needs more and better documentation. So I asked the write-the-docs community for help and I got answers.
Jody Winter - a technical writer from New Zealand - already created a new taxonomy for the website and has re-written large parts of the docs.

I also hope that we can update and add some of the tutorials to make docToolchain even more easier to use.

That's it for this update. If you would like to, you can send me feedback at [email protected] . I would love to hear from you!

Once again, thank you for your ongoing support and spread your love for docToolchain! 
Ralf